On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 3:32 PM, Mike Gerdts <mgerdts at gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 4:32 PM, Clay Baenziger <clayb at sun.com> wrote: >> >> First, we discussed how in AI current, adding any new system in AI will >> change the install matrix, since AI follows an "always install" mentality >> (we have the default manifest and will always try to give the client >> something). Perhaps this is an undesirable feature moving into some >> enterprise realms? > > That is somewhat problematic.? Historically jumpstart servers have been used > as the "rescue disk" on the network.? Introduction of something that will > install automatically when you type "boot net" is really bad when sysadmins > are trained that it is safe to do because "boot net - install" is the > dangerous one.
Indeed. Having 'boot net' do an install is horrifically dangerous - especially as there is long-established historical precedent that it doesn't, and there's a well understood mechanism to change the behaviour. It's a slightly different path but a similar problem on x86. You don't pass the install argument to the boot program, so how do you determine whether a network boot actually wanted an install? You may get accidental network boots because of system problems, (some glitch renders the boot disk inaccessible and it falls through to network boot), and you absolutely don't want it to do an install as a result. (In jumpstart it prompts you for what you want to do, and defaults to interactive. I leave mine set that way by default so that nothing bad happens, even though you can get jumpstart to bypass that prompt and do the install straight off.) This opens a wider discussion of network booting. As Mike says, network booting is widely used as a recovery mechanism. And diagnostic - it's common for sparc machines to boot off the network in diagnostic mode. So that's still needed, and you don't really want to have different mechanisms set up for a normal net boot and an install boot. There are other things that you can do with net boot that aren't even OS related - booting a diagnostic image, a raid configuration tool, or a BIOS update. It would be nice to have those built into the framework (just as a hook to say 'boot this other image' - even better if it was 'boot this other image just the once'). -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
